'S02 PSTCHOLOOT. 



pin, as the saying is, our faith in all the rest ; and our 

 belief returns instinctively even to those of them from 

 which reflection has led it away. Witness the obduracy 

 with which the popular world of colors, sounds, and smjlls 

 holds its own against that of molecules and vibrations. 

 Let the physicist himself but nod, like Homer, and the 

 world of sense becomes his absolute reality again.* 



That things originally devoid of this stimulating power 

 should be enabled, by association with other things which 

 have it, to compel our belief as if they had it themselves, is a 

 remarkable psychological fact, which since Hume's time it 

 has been impossible to overlook. 



" The vividness of the first conception," he writes, "diffuses itself 

 along the relations and is conveyed, as by so many pipes or channels, to 

 every idea that has any communication with the primary one. . . . 

 Superstitious people are fond of the relics of saints and holy men, for the 

 same reason that they seek after types and images, in order to enliven 

 their devotion and give them a more intimate and strong conception of 

 those exemplary lives. . . . Now, 'tis evident one of the best relics a 

 devotee could procure would be the handiwork of a saint, and if his 

 clothes and furniture are ever to be considered in this light, 'tis because 

 they were once at his disposal, and were moved and affected by him; in 

 which respect they are . . . connected with him by a shorter train of 

 consequences than any of those from which we learn the reality of his 



* The way in which sensations are pitted against systematized concep- 

 tions, and in which the one or the other then prevails according as the 

 sensations are felt by ourselves or merely known by report, is interestingly 

 illustrated at the present day by the state of public belief about ' spiritual- 

 istic ' phenomena. There exist numerous narratives of movement without 

 contact on the part of articles of furniture and other material objects, in 

 the presence of certain privileged individuals called mediums. Such move- 

 ment violates our memories, and the whole system of accepted physical 

 'science.' Consequently those who have not seen it either brand the 

 narratives immediately as lies or call the phenomena 'illusions' of sense, 

 produced by fraud or due to hallucination. But one who has actually seen 

 such a phenomenon, under what seems to him sufficiently ' test-conditions,' 

 will hold to his sensible experience through thick and thin, even though 

 the whole fabric of ' science ' should be rent in twain. That man would 

 be a weak-spirited creature indeed who should allow any fly-blown gener- 

 alities about ' the liability of the senses to be deceived ' to bully him out of 

 his adhesion to what for him was an indubitable experience of sight. A 

 man may err in this obstinacy, sure enough, in any particular case. But 

 the spirit that animates him is that on which ultimately the very life and 

 health of Science rest. 



